In 1991, George Rodrigue created a painting called Right Place, Wrong Time, featuring his iconic Blue Dog as the focal point. Early in the Blue Dog series, Rodrigue imagined the dog, inspired by his late pet Tiffany, as being on a journey to find him. In this narrative, Tiffany’s spirit mistakenly ended up in the wrong artist’s studio, adding a layer of playful mystique to the Blue Dog’s presence. In Right Place, Wrong Time, the Blue Dog appears in a surreal scene, set against a backdrop of nude figures inspired by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ 19th-century painting Turkish Bath. This juxtaposition is framed within one of Rodrigue’s signature Louisiana landscapes, characterized by dark, brooding oak trees, enhancing the painting’s enigmatic mood.
A year later, Rodrigue created duplicate versions of Right Place, Wrong Time in a different medium. In the early 1990s, Rodrigue occasionally created versions of his Cajun and Blue Dog paintings that were not lithographs or silkscreens but were done in multiples. He called these versions Direct Image Transfers (DIT), and they were primarily created at the request of a collector if a desired original painting was no longer available. You can think of a DIT as a high-quality, large-format photograph of a painting rendered on masonite board or canvas. Rodrigue usually covered these works with a layer of varnish to protect the image. We’ve added a UV plexiglass to preserve the work’s color and surface.
Rodrigue created DITs for a few years before committing fully to the printmaking process as a way to reproduce his work. For that reason, there are not many DITs in circulation.
Right Place, Wrong Time
1992
Direct Image Transfer on wood masonite
40 x 30 inches (sold framed as is)
Available and on display at Rodrigue Studios New Orleans. Contact us at [email protected] to learn more.